LAUSR

Continuing professional development and remediation of deficits are important aspects of ensuring optimal physician performance and patient safety. Affected stakeholders such as regulators, patients, care providers and the public are increasingly paying attention to medical underperformance. Even with such attention to physician performance and accountability, the remediation of practising physicians continues to be plagued by various challenges. Opining that challenges with physician remediation are in part due to our limited understanding of how remediation of practising physicians is conceptualised, Bourgeois-Law et al. conducted a qualitative study exploring the conceptualisation of the remediation of practising physicians. In an article featured in this issue, the authors identify two conceptualisations of remediating practising physicians: remediation as an educational process on a continuum of learning and remediation as a regulatory process. They seem to suggest that simultaneously holding these ‘conflicting’ conceptualisations of physician remediation is somehow problematic, and conclude that efforts need to be made to avoid the ‘de-professionalisation’ that accompanies the regulatory conceptualisation of remediation.